Has anyone bent up a custom sway bar? I would think a guy could find out what is the right kind of bar stock, heat it up to bend it where needed, bend it to fit a jig or a pattern, and viola! A new custom sway bar. Will that work? What type of material? Will heating it to bend it effect the temper or the springiness of it? Thanks, Joel
There is another thread here somewhere about this. I used a bar stock called Stressproof which worked very well. What car is it needed on?
I would be really concerned about wrecking the temper of the bar with a torch and trying to bend it in the garage. Incorrect application of heat could easily lead to a stress riser or poor grain structure in the material and your sway bar's life time will be measured in dozens of load cycles, not millions. Proper heat treatment after forming is also important. Talk to Bauer Welding and Fabrication in St. Paul. http://www.bauerweld.com/ When I worked for Arctic Cat, we had Bauer make up all sorts of prototype and one-off anti-sway bars, and I am looking at them to make up a prototype anti-sway bar for a Rosenbauer Fire Truck with a 24,000 lb capacity IFS (2" solid bar on that one).
Easiest way is to get the dimensions you need for your sway bar and head to the salvage yard with you paper and tape measure and find an OEM close enough to work! You can buy sway bars at my local salvage for under $25! Bones
If you can use a straight bar with arms attached at the ends, Speedway Motors has a universal sway bar kit. Otherwise, the earlier comments about the heat treatment are honest concerns. How about finding a junk yard donor car that is about the same weight as your project car? Be careful, a poor combo will make your car a handful to drive through corners.
Umm, if you heat a previously heat treated bar to bend it, it ceases to be an active anti-sway bar. You do this and you've destroyed the original heat treatment..! It's not a spring any longer. Bend a heat treated bar cold (hard to do), or bend it in its annealed state, then heat treat it. Or, as others have noted, Splined bars with separate arms work well. Just like heating a coil spring...what happens...the car "falls" ! MIke
my good buddy dave ( RIP ) built hot rods with out summit or speedway . on saturday mornings you went to one of the local junk yards ( remember them ? ) and scrounged for a close fitting sway bar . many times he would cut them in the middle to narrow it , v grind and reweld letting it cool slowly . the metalurgists might shudder but they worked just fine . To bad those days are gone , i miss treasure hunting at bone yards with my buddies .
Try Speedway Engineering Speedway Engineering (1speedway.com) and select . Adjustability and fitment a huge benefit of splined design. We have on three cars, but besides using adjustable holed arms you can swap in lighter or heavier bars according to situation
Another option would be to have a professional make a bar that fits and works as it should: https://www.carolinaswaybar.com/
Those guys should know what they're doing. Addco has made more aftermarket sway bars than anyone else. 25-30 years ago, they moved from Florida to Linville NC, which is just a wide place in the road. Then around 5 years ago they moved their operation back to Florida. The guys at Carolina learned how to do it working at Addco. Because they're much smaller than Addco, it's likely they'd be much more receptive to making custom bars.
I have heated and bent the ends of sway bars to adapt them to fit and work in spaces that required a change in order to fit the vehicle I was working on. To me the spring part of the bar is in the center, while the ends are levers. It has worked for me. Not knowing it can not or should not be done has worked out for me. I have to make things rather than buy stuff. This topic reminds me of another one from days gone by. Someone asked about cutting coils off of springs. After there were many replies recommending to use something other than an acetylene torch, a guy post that he has worked with springs for years and cut everyone with a torch. In the end, I guess we have to pick the answer that seems to best fit our situation.
I left the sway bar brackets on my 8.8 hoping to use them on my 55. I kept the sway bar hoping to reuse it. Following this closely.
If you aren't going to get too fancy on the ends you should be able to have a spring shop that can do coil springs bend one up to your pattern and heat treat it. I'd have the pattern made up and in hand when I walked in the door though. It won't be cheap, I had the local spring shop make me one main leaf for my trailer and it ran a tad over 100 bucks. That was with waiting until after their "we make the springs today" day. It was so hot that summer that they were only wanting to heat up the forge one day a week.
From the book Tune to win, by Carroll Smith. More intended for racing where weight is a big factor, but still perfectly good on slower street cars with bad handling too.
I agree with Boneyard51 and Rickeybop that the easiest way is to find a suitable one at a salvage yard. One you might look at for a lightweight vehicle is one from the rear of a Saturn "Vue". Its very light and would work well in the rear of a hot rod. Fairly narrow too. I put one in a truck I'm building. Another thing you might consider is the splined sway bars. Then you put splined arms on the ends. The splined arms can be heated and bent if needed and then quenched in some oil. Just don't get too big a sway bar. This sway bar has large splined ends but tapers down to a much smaller diameter. I chose it because it had the length I needed and a reasonable size crossbar.
Welder series has a kit, I like it, but it’ll cost a bit..... https://welderseries.com/Sway-Bar-K...NN6Txtkyxb7jXY1Qbp5VbOkVK_foPPHBoCt28QAvD_BwE Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
I put an OT front end under a 35-40 chassis with narrowed spindles, seems Heidts forgot about the spindles and the sway bar was too long, so I tightened up the “S” curves on the end in my press, did it cold. Now I don’t know if it was heat treated or not, but did bend a lot harder and had more “bounce back” than plain rod would. I am definitely in the camp of a salvage yard and tape measure and finding something close, then modified to fit
The Jalopy Journal
